Portrait of Tong Zheng

Tong Zheng 郑童

zhengtong12356@gmail.com

About Me

I am a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Prof. Heng Huang. Previously, I worked as a research assistant at the Natural Language Processing Laboratory of Northeastern University (China), supervised by Prof. Tong Xiao. I received my B.E. degree from Northeastern University of Computer Science and Engineering in 2021.

Research

My research focuses on enhancing LLM reasoning and test-time scaling.

Reasoning and Test-Time Scaling: Parallel-R1 (ICLR'26) introduces first RL-based parallel thinking for LLMs, moving beyond sequential chain-of-thought. AutoTTS (arXiv'26) unlocks a new direction for test-time scaling—automatically discovering strategies via agentic search instead of hand-crafted inference heuristics. Parallel-Probe (ICML'26) enables efficient parallel thinking through 2D probing. MoT (ICLR'26) explores mixture-of-thought representations for logical reasoning.

Efficient Training & Inference: Multi-Draft Speculative Decoding (ICLR'25) improves the inference speed–quality trade-off via multi-draft decoding. Asymmetric MMT (ACL Findings'25) studies conflict and synergy in post-training for multilingual machine translation.

Foundation Models: UMST (ICML'22) builds multiscale Transformers over sub-word, word, and phrase units with word-boundary and phrase-level structure. EIT (ACL'24) enhances multi-head self-attention by encouraging consensus across heads via inner- and cross-subspace interactions. PartialFormer (ACL Findings'24) replaces monolithic FFNs with multiple partial FFNs for parameter-efficient Transformers.

News

Older news
  • Check our new paper for VLM exploration: VOGUE — visual uncertainty guided exploration.
  • Check our new papers for LLM reasoning: Parallel-R1 and CDE.
  • One paper accepted for publication at EMNLP 2025.
  • Two papers accepted for publication at ACL 2025 Findings.
  • I will join Tencent AI Lab (Seattle) as a research intern this summer.
  • One paper accepted for publication at ICLR 2025.
  • One paper accepted for publication at NeurIPS 2024.
  • One paper accepted for publication at EMNLP 2024 Main.
  • Started my Ph.D. study at University of Maryland, College Park.
  • Two papers accepted for publication at ACL 2024 (1 Main, 1 Findings).
  • One paper accepted at Findings of EMNLP 2023.
  • Learning Multiscale Transformer Models for Sequence Generation accepted at ICML 2022 (First ICML in NEUNLP).
  • Joined NEUNLP lab as a research assistant.
  • Graduated from Northeastern University with an average GPA of 4.0.

Experience

Selected Publications (* Equal Contribution)

NEW

LLMs Improving LLMs: Agentic Discovery for Test-Time Scaling paper

arXiv, May 2026

Tong Zheng, Haolin Liu, Chengsong Huang, Huiwen Bao, Sheng Zhang, Rui Liu, Runpeng Dai, Ruibo Chen, Chenxi Liu, Tianyi Xiong, Xidong Wu, Hongming Zhang, Heng Huang

NEW

Parallel-Probe: Towards Efficient Parallel Thinking via 2D Probing paper

ICML 2026

Tong Zheng*, Chengsong Huang*, Runpeng Dai*, Yun He, Rui Liu, Xin Ni, Huiwen Bao, Kaishen Wang, Hongtu Zhu, Jiaxin Huang, Furong Huang, Heng Huang

NEW

Parallel-R1: Towards Parallel Thinking via Reinforcement Learning paper · Project

ICLR 2026 Main Conference; NeurIPS ER Workshop Spotlight

Tong Zheng, Hongming Zhang, Wenhao Yu, Xiaoyang Wang, Xinyu Yang, Runpeng Dai, Rui Liu, Huiwen Bao, Chengsong Huang, Heng Huang, Dong Yu

NEW

Learning to Reason via Mixture-of-Thought for Logical Reasoning paper

ICLR 2026 Main Conference; NeurIPS ER Workshop

Tong Zheng*, Lichang Chen*, Simeng Han, R. Thomas McCoy, Heng Huang

Asymmetric Conflict and Synergy in Post-training for LLM-based Multilingual Machine Translation paper

ACL Findings, 2025

Tong Zheng, Yan Wen, Huiwen Bao, Junfeng Guo, Heng Huang

Towards Optimal Multi-draft Speculative Decoding paper

ICLR 2025

Zhengmian Hu*, Tong Zheng*, Vignesh Viswanathan, Ziyi Chen, Ryan A. Rossi, Yihan Wu, Dinesh Manocha, Heng Huang

A Bayesian Approach to Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Authorship Attribution paper

EMNLP 2024 Main

Zhengmian Hu*, Tong Zheng*, Heng Huang

PartialFormer: Modeling Part Instead of Whole Paper

ACL 2024 Findings

Tong Zheng*, Bei Li*, Huiwen Bao*, Weiqiao Shan, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu

EIT: Enhanced Interactive Transformer Paper

ACL 2024 Main Conference

Tong Zheng*, Bei Li*, Huiwen Bao*, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu

Learning Multiscale Transformer Models for Sequence Generation Paper

ICML 2022

Bei Li*, Tong Zheng*, Yi Jing*, Chengbo Jiao, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu

Manuscript

BrainTGL: Temporal Graph Representation Learning for Brain Network by Exploiting Graph Temporal Information Manuscript

Finished at August 2021

Tong Zheng

Selected Honors